new church life: march/april 2016
of us into a conjugial union, a marriage,
which will last forever in heaven. As
He explained in the Gospels, He has
wanted this from the beginning, and
He works to make this happen for
every human being who will ever be
born, if they are willing.
So now we are going to look into
what exactly it is that the Lord wants to
join together and what we need to do in
order not to put it asunder.
The Lord teaches us what it is that
He wants to join together in the very
first chapter of Genesis. We learn early
on in the Sacred Scripture that, “God
created man in His [own] image, in the
image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Genesis
1:27) Then, in the very next chapter of the Word we learn that, “Therefore shall
a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they
shall be one flesh.” (Ibid.. 2:24)
When Jesus was teaching the Pharisees about marriage in Matthew, He was
referring to these passages from Genesis because He was explaining to them
the fundamental nature of marriage. His answer went beyond their specific
question. The Lord was explaining what marriage is from the beginning.
It is man and woman that the Lord joins together. We can see this through
the very first human pair in the Word – Adam and Eve. And in the New
Testament the Lord brings forward this ancient definition of marriage and
reminds the Pharisees where it came from. They knew He was quoting from
Genesis.
But now, in the Lord’s Second Coming He explains to us in detail why it
is male and female that are joined together in marriage and why it has been so
from the beginning.
The Lord teaches us in Conjugial Love that, “since a person lives as a man
after death, and man is male and female, and the masculine is one and the
feminine another, and they are so different that one cannot be changed into
the other, it follows that after death the male lives as a male and the female as
a female.” (Conjugial Love 32)
The Lord underscores this truth repeating that “the masculine cannot
be changed into the feminine, nor the feminine into the masculine, and that
therefore after death the male is a male and the female is a female.” (Ibid.)
We learn that this is true even down to every cell of the body. For the Lord
The Lord explains
what marriage is in
the Gospels because
He wants more than
anything to join
together each one of
us with a partner in an
eternal marriage of one
man with one wife.
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